Bang to rights
May 11th, 2012 • mobility • No comments
Bang to Rights
By Camille Barbagallo & Nic Beuret
In light of Strangers into Citizens’ campaign for an amnesty for ‘illegals’ in the UK, Camille Barbagallo & Nic Beuret consider how such an act of ‘generosity’ on the part of the state would also reaffirm its power as the giver – as well as denier – of rights
On 7 May 2007 several thousand ‘migrants’ (some with papers, some without) mobilised and took part in an ongoing campaign, coordinated in the main by religious groups and community organisations, for an amnesty for ‘illegals’ currently living in the UK. While rough surveys amongst the crowd showed that most people were there to support the idea of an amnesty – an amnesty without limitations – that was not the point of the rally, nor the mass held beforehand. In fact the rally was organised as part of a campaign for managed migration, made on behalf of migrants without papers by a group called Strangers into Citizens (SiC):
Strangers into Citizens is a campaign by the Citizen Organising Foundation (COF), an alliance of faith and community organizations across London and in Birmingham.[1]
To explore the question of ‘organising’ with and amongst people without papers, we wish to use as our departure point those ‘illegals’ the SiC amnesty supposedly speaks for. That is, not those people who work illegally, without national insurance numbers, those who avoid paying tax, or work in illegal industries, but those who are in the UK without visas or papers that would give them the legal right to remain. In making such a distinction, we are not claiming that the work they do or their ‘illegality’ is essentially different to other people who labour and/or live illegally; rather we believe that there exists a continuum along which labour and life enter into a problematic with legality (or ‘become illegal’). And though it would be interesting to see how much of life and labour in the UK is always already ‘becoming illegal’ (and concretely how people seek to ‘go illegal’ as a survival strategy), we will stay with those ‘strangers’ that SiC want to help become citizens. Both because of the specifics of the SiC campaign and because of the problematic posed by migrants without papers. We also need to be clear that there is no singular migrant subjectivity or category: the migrant is defined at best as a particular kind of ‘temporary’ subjectivity or social relation – temporary, even if it lasts for a lifetime, because of its transitory nature. Positing and organising migrants as though they were homogeneous or in possession of a singular subjectivity with specifically ‘migrant’ characteristics is in many ways the first step to policing and controlling them.
We lack resistance to the present
May 11th, 2012 • organisation • No comments
There have been a number of articles in recent issues of The Commune reflecting on what kind of organisation it should be. Indeed, many in the radical left have returned to questions of organisation as a result of the decline and dispersal of the protests and projects of the ‘networked’ anti-globalisation movement.
Somewhat surprisingly there is a great deal of agreement across the radical, conservative and traditional political spectrum that the purpose and function of political organisation is to produce propaganda, agitate, debate and discuss. That is to say, the left wing version is of a form of politics that is stuck in a loop of producing pamphlets, newspapers and websites, and hosting debates and conferences. Almost universally the question of politics is posed as one of communication, and political organisation as bringing together people with the same political understanding or perspective – be they anarcho-syndicalists, the EDL, feminists, social democrats or left communists –to set ideas into motion; to create a like-minded movement through common political positions and analysis.
But a rupture in the consensus of what constitutes politics and resistance is not only necessary but urgent: our point of departure needs to start from the question of organising from within moments of resistance and existing conflict, and it is only from there that we can move to the circulation of theory and ideas.